Syd’s Reviews > Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism > Status Update

For the most part, precisely what is so alarming about sundown towns--their astonishing prevalence across the country--is what has made them *not* newsworthy, except on special occassions. Murders sell newspapers. Chronic social pathology does not.

The key question is, do those whites willing to keep out African Americans sense that they have at least tacit backing from the police and public? If they do, it only takes a few of them, unfettered by others, to create or maintain a town's racist reputation.

Whites might claim to be upset by problematic African-Americans--criminals and ne'er-do-wells--but more frequently they lashed out at those who were industrious and successful, for it was these families whose existence set up a claim to social and economic equality.

But when African-Americans were the strikebreakers, a special hostility came into play. Having first gotten their toehold in America by being strike-breakers in many cases, white ethnics now reacted venomously to black strike-breakers.

American labor history is replete with the use of outsiders as strikebreakers. Capitalists often used white ethnic groups different from (and lower in status than) their workers who were on strike, because these newer immigrants had little solidarity with the workers whose jobs they were taking. Coal mine owners especially... used each successive ethnic group as strikebreakers against the last.

According to John Denton, who studied housing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 'One of the principal purposes (if not the entire purpose) of suburban incorporations is to give their populations control of the racial composition of their communities.' When they incorporated, suburbs typically drew their boundaries to exclude African American neighborhoods.

Every planned town that I know of--indeed, every community in America founded after 1890 and before 1960 by a single developer or owner--kept out African Americans from its beginnings.

It is important to understand that the whiteness of America's suburbs was no accident. On the contrary, all-white suburbs were *achieved.* As Dorothy Newman wrote in 1978, 'Residential separation rests on a system of formal rules (though no longer worded in racial terms--the words are illegal) and informal but carefully adhered-to practices which no amount of legislation has been able yet to penetrate.'